Power price rises spark council budget review

The Mayor of Alice Springs says the council will be doing an immediate budget review to try to mitigate the impact of power and water price rises.

Damien Ryan says it will cost council an extra $375,000 this financial year and a further $750,000 for the following year.

He says councillors will be looking at how to pay for the increases under the current budget and into the future and council will try and keep any rate rises to a minimum.

"We'll have to discover where we'll have to remove programs or where we'll have to shift money from but it's not only that, we'll also need to with this budget review take into account where we're going to meet these cost increases in the future," he said.

He says some council programs may have to be scrapped to pay for the price rises.

"We need to find how we're going to cover these costs which we estimate to be around $375,000 in the last six months of this budgetary year as this comes in in January but we'll be working on next year's budget very early in the new year," he said.

"We need to discover how and where we're going to fund these increases and how we're going to work with them into the future."